Amit Singhal

Singhal said that mobile search traffic growth over the past three years is comparable to Google desktop search traffic growth over the same duration earlier in the company's history.

Google Fellow Amit Singhal June 14 introduced a host of search features focused on mobility and speed. Singhal, Google's new steward for search announcements since Marissa Mayer moved to the company's geolocal team, talked about the way users' desktop search queries remain strong throughout the work week but taper off on Friday and Saturday as users tear themselves free from their computers to do other things. However, while this happens, Google sees mobile search queries rise precipitously on the weekends because these same users switch to their smartphones or tablet computers to conduct searches in their leisure time. "The thirst for knowledge doesn't stop when you step away from your computer, it continues on your mobile device," Singhal said. "In the past two years, mobile search traffic has grown five-fold. Mobile search today is growing at a comparable pace to Google in the early years." Indeed, Singhal's search team also trotted out voice search for the desktop, an example of how Google has ported speech technology from its mobile applications to larger computer screens. To our mind, the coolest thing we saw watching the Webcast on YouTube remotely, was Google Instant Pages. This feature uses prerendering technology built by Google Chrome engineers to display Web pages in sub-second times. Google Instant with Images was also pretty cool. Take the tour of the new features with this eWEEK slideshow.